OpenStack for Private Cloud PLM?

The debates about cloud and PLM are in full swing. In my view, Why Cloud? is a wrong question these days. I think, the question “How to cloud…?” comes to the first place. One of the most prominent discussion is about private vs. public cloud. The concern about potential leak of corporate knowledge is a valid concerns. For  companies in heavy regulated industries private or hybrid cloud is probably the right solution compared to widely used public clouds from Amazon and other cloud infrastructure vendors.

My attention was caught by ReadWrite article – The Open-Source Cloud Takes A Step Toward Simplicity. OpenStack is fast growing free and open source cloud computing platform primarily deployed as an Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) solution. It is available under Apache license and currently managed by OpenStack Foundation.

The article speaks about company Mirantis that decided to simplify the deployment of OpenStack. The result is product – OpenStack Express hosted by IBM Softlayer infrastructure. Here is a passage from article that will give you the idea what is that about:

Mirantis hopes to change that with OpenStack Express, an OpenStack-as-a-service offering hosted on IBM’s Softlayer infrastructure. It’s intended to make deploying OpenStack easier and faster, freeing developers to focus on their applications. IBM provides the data center underpinnings, and Mirantis provides the software and 24/7 support for the self-service, on-demand offering, the first of its kind in the OpenStack world.

“What Amazon does for public clouds, we do for private clouds,” said Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis. OpenStack Express essentially lets you rent bare-metal servers that don’t get shared with other customers, quickly deploy software, and manage everything via a console.

The idea to have easy deployed IaaS platform for private cloud is interesting. It can become an ideal platform for many manufacturing companies looking for cloud solutions and still having concerns about public cloud. It is also a benefit for for PLM software vendors that will be able to provide their cloud PLM platforms on both private and public cloud with minimum infrastructure changes.

What is my conclusion? Development cost and maintenance is critical factor for every cloud PLM providers. This is one of the reasons many of them are focusing on public cloud only. However, availability of Amazon-like private cloud platform can be a game changer in PLM cloud adoption. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg